Chapter 3 | Tales of a haunted house

The events of our lives slowly mold us into the person we are to ultimately become. I'd often question the reasoning behind many a things, even though I knew that the answer would be beyond comprehension.

Still, I was curious to know, and I didn't stop asking. It was only when I was older, that I could begin to understand certain aspects of my life and how, looking back, they made sense. I think, as the years went on, that that is how it was for Mama too.

Mama is the eldest daughter of six children. She has two sisters and three brothers. Her father, my Nana doted on my mother. She was his favorite and none of her siblings could argue with that.

When she married my father, he was crushed (Nana, not my Dad). Like every father he felt his daughter deserved so much better. But my Nani had the upper hand and once she had agreed to it, there was no way Mama would have contradicted her.

I asked her once, why didn't she stand up for herself? Why didn't she have the courage to say no?

She said: 'It wasn't that I didn't have a say but I was consumed by the acceptance that our elders know best.'

I've heard my Nani often say: 'You know one one nice proposals my daughter had. I don't know why I was in a hurry to marry her off.' Yeah, well, that makes two of us Nani.

Realization often comes at a later stage. Wisdom, with the protrusion of grey hairs (and upper arm cellulite).

My grandparents owned a massive 10 bedroom house in Clare state then. At night it had a sinister 'haunted house' appeal to it. Not that this was without truth though.

The previous owner had purchased the house for a paltry $100. The story goes that the house actually housed the ghost of the person that was killed there not long before.

There was one incident in particular that left me convinced that the house had, not the wandering spirit of a murdered soul, but actual Jinn.

In the very early parts of the morning, whilst every one was in bed, the sound of kitchenware banging against each other emitted from the kitchen downstairs. Over breakfast it was discovered that no one had actually been in the kitchen then and everyone had assumed my Nani was carrying out a bout of O(H)CD. Over (hyper) cooking disorder (more about this later).

She wasn't and the mystery of the banging pots remains unsolved till this day.

I can still remember the dingy bathroom underneath the stairway with its slanted roof.The massive empty rooms upstairs filled with roaches large enough to be mistaken for baby sized mice and the steep stairs outside that housed Lailah, the ferocious yet gentle guard dog.

When I was 3 days old I had fallen off the bed. The loud 'thud' had brought everyone running to my direction in panic only to find me sound asleep on the floor.

'You had jinn from then.' My mother jokingly said the first time she shared the story with me. 'What a high bed you fell off and still you didn't wake.'

Though it did give me a viable life long excuse if anything. 'Oh, I couldn't do my homework. No, it wasn't my dog this time. See, I fell off the bed when I was a baby and sometimes I get these fatal blackouts that require me to lie down for hours on end.'

The fatal blackouts weren't at all true but how were they to know.